The landscape of survey options for digital marketers is vast. With so many available tools, it is understandable that building your own could feel unnecessary. While there are many tools, most won’t hit on every requirement. Or the survey tool will come with many other features you don’t have a need for at the moment. With that in mind, I invited Mark Somers to join the Tampa Salesforce Marketers Group to present about how he was able to build his own survey tool in Salesforce and Account Engagement (Pardot). Watch the recording: The post How to build your own surveys in Account Engagement ..read more

Here’s a weird solution to an uncommon use case involving Account Engagement (Pardot)! Let’s say you need to send an email and want to be able to have reporting on each of the links that are clicked on in the email. That’s not unusual. It becomes trickier when you want to do this without using UTMs or Custom Redirects/Tracking Links. MCAE provides link reporting in the List Email reports. You can see it on each email. Unfortunately, that link-level engagement reporting does not exist on the List Email reports you can build in Salesforce. The individual links are tough to report on if they ..read more

When creating an email series or drip campaign in Account Engagement (Pardot), getting the timing right on wait steps is so important. Unlike other MAPs, Account Engagement does not have specific “wait” steps to add to a flow. Instead the waiting is added to the next step in the Engagement Studio. For example, send an email and then on the next email, add a wait step of two days after the Prospect arrives at the step before sending. When you include Evaluation or Listen steps to the process the timing becomes more important. Your instinct might be to set the wait step on the next email bef ..read more

Most sales organizations have sales teams who are responsible for specific regions. Getting the right leads to those reps is critical to the team’s success. Lead qualification functionality exists inside Salesforce. But what about qualifying records BEFORE they reach Salesforce? In this Salesforce Marketer Group (Pardot) Tampa meeting, I ran a live workshop demonstrating the different ways that prospect routing in Account Engagement (Pardot) can be done. I use Engagement Studio, Automation Rules, and Completion Actions to demonstrate functionality. Watch the recording here: The post Live work ..read more

In a previous post I shared a low-fi way to track opt-outs and database churn inside your Account Engagement (Pardot) org. That topic spurred additional comments on my LinkedIn post about it Among the comments was one from my friend Timo Kovala where he mentioned a solution he had for this using B2B Marketing Analytics. I asked him if he would be willing to share the solution for the Tampa Account Engagement Community Group and he agreed to. Below is the recording from the meeting, where he shares how to build a prospect database churn tool in B2BMA. The post How B2B Marketing Analytics can m ..read more

The ability to natively build scoring and grading on leads is one of the functions of Account Engagement (Pardot) that sets it apart from other marketing automation tools. It’s also something that is not well understood or managed in many instances. There’s a decent amount of up-front work to do in order to get it working right. In this live workshop session for the Tampa Salesforce Marketer Group (Pardot), I shared how scoring and grading can be built using out-of-the-box features. Watch the video here: The post How to build scoring and grading in Account Engagement (Pardot) appeared first o ..read more

When building a campaign cadence in Account Engagement (Pardot), setting up the campaigns correctly in Salesforce is an important step. The campaign cadence in Pardot/MCAE often will be built around the funnel – TOFU, MOFU, BOFU. As you execute your marketing tactics around each funnel stage, it is important to add the campaign participants to the appropriate Salesforce campaign as campaign members. After a campaign has been running for a while, your sales or marketing leadership may ask you a question something like this: “How can I see the leads/contacts who are in each of the mark ..read more

Before you create another form in Account Engagement (FKA Pardot), do yourself a favor. Head over to the Conversions report in Account Engagement Reports. Open the most recent conversions from three or four forms that are currently active. Check the prospect’s activity record and see what’s there. Do you see the form completion? Cool. Do you see any website activity that happened directly before or after that form conversion? No? Not cool. Tracking codes are meant to provide you with prospect web activity before and after a form conversion. If the form completions are being recorded but nothin ..read more

I had a philosophical conversation with Peter Sabba about the utility of email preference centers and their value as a whole to email marketing. The take-away was this: typically your email recipients do not click the preference center link in your emails because they want to get MORE email from you. At best they want to tailor what email they get from you. My opinion is that most people are looking for ways to get LESS email from you… or to stop getting email from you entirely. Having a preference center on the emails you send to people tells recipients that they have a choice. They ..read more

In Account Engagement (Pardot) the dashboard shows you how many new prospects were created on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. The visualization is easy to understand and tells a compelling story. But… what about the other side? What about the number of prospects you are losing each day/week/month? (Note: “Losing” means they globally opt out or hard bounce). In every org I get access to, one of the first things I do is create a Dynamic List of unmailable and/or hard bounced prospects. The first time you run it, it will collect all prospects opted out all time. That’s to be expected and isn’t that ..read more